MiSTer FPGA Forum

I had some Demos crashing on me and freezes in Menu´s on the Amiga Core and I figured out it seems to happen
when my external HDD had to much idle time and went to rest. When the Core pulls a request for Data, she needs a bit of time
to wake up and starts spinning, which seems to me the reason for my experiences mentioned.

Is there a way to keep the external HDD on alert / busy and stopping her from going to resting mode again?

Spin down for power saving is generally built into the drive firmware these days. I've seen a couple help threads (not here) describe using the Linux utility 'hdparm' to disable the spin down function, although some reported it doesn't work on some drives. I'm pretty sure this program is not packaged with MiSter, so you would need a Linux computer to attempt this.

sdparm --clear=STANDBY /dev/sdX -S

Where X is the letter of your external drive.

Others have suggested making a cron job to write to the drive on a timer to reset the spin down timer. I'm also not sure if MiSTer has a cron package installed, but it's more likely than hdparm.